This page contains several tools and utilities that I've written for Windows NT. Some of them also work on Windows 95/98. I've put the source code online for some of them as well.

IPTrace

IPTrace traces the network route from your machine to any host on the Internet. It displays the IP address and host name for all hosts in the path, and also the average round-trip time to each host from your machine. When run with the -g option, IPTrace "graphically" displays the proportional transmission delay for each segment of the route. If you're browsing a slow Web site, this can help you figure out where the bottleneck is in the network path. IPTrace runs on both Windows 95/98 and Windows NT. Get the executable and the source code for IPTrace here.

Event Watcher

The Windows NT event log is very useful, but not easy to use. Many times, critical system errors (such as disk errors) are reported to the event log, but there is no user notification; you have to run the Event Viewer and browse the log yourself. Event Watcher lives in the taskbar and watches the Windows NT event log for you. Whenever any application or system component logs an event, it pops up a dialog box and shows you the event data. You can disable the dialog box from popping up, in which case the Event Watcher icon in the taskbar icon tray turns red when an event is logged. When you click on the icon, the dialog box pops up. Event Watcher can be configured to watch any or all of the three NT event logs, and can also be configured to report only error events. Get Event Watcher here.

Process Status

PS is a console application that displays useful process-related information such as process ID, number of threads, number of open handles, process priority, etc. Unlike the utilities that come with Windows and Visual Studio, PS works on Windows 95/98 as well as Windows NT. Since the methods for collecting process info are different on the two platforms, PS dynamically loads the appropriate DLLs at runtime depending on the OS. Use the -h option to see the various options supported. Get the PS executable here.

CPUHog

CPUHog is a CPU stress utility. Unlike the tools that come with the Platform SDK, CPUHog can be told to consume an exact percentage of the total CPU cycles, to simulate system processing loads. This often helps in the stress testing of applications. CPUHog puts up a little dialog box in which you can specify the percentage of CPU cycles to consume. It uses the NT performance data to control its own CPU usage. CPUHog was described in the Windows Developers' Journal: see the Articles page for details. Download the executable as well as the source code.

If you have questions or comments, please email me. Thanks for visiting!